Jock Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum 9/10
Look people, here's the thing. It's John Wick doing Jonh Wick things and doing it well and with style.
Buuut if we were to actually bother to judge the film more critically (why would anyone do that?) I would say that this one is lacking a bit in the visual style of its predecessors. While the location and set design and cinematography are still top notch, I felt as though it were a lot more superficial this time. It's still helluva good to get sunk in to the world of these movies, even in the few mundane locals.
The plot pretty much progresses linearly from objective to objective, making it feel very much like a standard video game formula of "talk to this guy > have a fight > do the thing guy said to do > talk to the next guy > repeat as necessary." As a vehicle for an ongoing series of kickass action segments, I mean it's simple but it works. It felt like there were a lot of throwaway characters and a rather cheap fake out "or did he?" cliffhanger ending setting things up hard for the next one.
For now, John Wick movies are the only series of movies I bother to see in theaters don't mind more of. Three installments in and the series doesn't seem stale or tired or balls out incompetent... yet. That's pretty much because it would be really hard to screw this up. Not that I'd put it past em, but all they have to do is keep the action as banging as it's been without going over the top and the story can pretty much fade into the background.
But the "without going over the top" is the serious caveat. John is not superman. And a few moments in this one pushed the limits of what I'm willing to accept. There is a natural tendency for ongoing action series to want to one up the stuntsmanship of the previous movie each time. See the Die Hard series for a perfect case study. Die Hard went from swinging off the top of an exploding building on a fire hose to tail surfing a crashing F-22 and diving out the back of a crashing cargo helicopter in a Jeep. John Wick isn't that bad yet, but it's like they're testing the fence for weaknesses.
Oh, and there were some CGI moments too. So far the series has resisted the temptation to use CGI but they finally went for it... and it could've been worse. It could have been James Bond parasailing a melting ice sheet tsunami bad but it's nowhere as bad as that at least. CGI is used briefly albeit obviously only a handful of times, and the last time was in conjunction with the worst over the top moment and it was by far the worst offender... and the worst looking.
So... action coreography and cinematography and stylish af art direction like nobody else can handle is John Wick's bread and butter. Does Parabellum succeed in this? Hells to the yeah. If you actually care about characters and story here well the movie has well developed characters and a story and excellent acting and some fascinating world building even and heck it even has some interesting themes playing out. It works. It's serviceable. That's as much as it needs while John Wick is going all Babba Yagga on all the things.